Playing to the Edge: American Intelligence in the Age of Terror (49 page)

So perhaps the goal here should not quite be transparency, but what Mike Leiter (former head of the National Counterterrorism Center) calls translucence. Mike says (and I agree) that the American intelligence community owes the public it serves enough data so that people can make out the broad shapes and broad movements of what intelligence is doing, but they do not need specific operational details. The former should suffice to build trust, while the latter would be destructive of espionage’s inherent purposes. Former national security advisor Steve Hadley echoed the theme when he told me that we can distinguish the policy framework from the operational details of an action.

Doing this will be hard. And doing it stupidly could be incredibly damaging. But, at the moment, we are living with the strategic impact of individually justifiable decisions to remain silent, and that impact is an intelligence community that is both less trusted and less effective than we need it to be.

We seem to be trending toward a bit more openness, but we don’t seem to be in a big hurry about it. The IC is posting more documents on its public Web site (icontherecord.tumblr.com, which was designed to be read as IC-ON-THE-RECORD but which opponents have dubbed I-CON-THE-RECORD). The FISA Court is also making public redacted versions of some of its decisions. Intelligence community officials continue to make public speeches.

But, no breakthroughs. In fact, the DNI’s inexplicable March 2014
guidance—as the intelligence community was being buffeted by near-daily Snowden-sourced allegations—made it more difficult for IC members to talk with outside audiences and counter the innuendo. Even people like me who continue to hold a security clearance were theoretically required to phone in, ask “Mother, may I?” and get guidance before responding to any journalist’s sincere request to explain some unfolding event or alleged scandal. And, remember, the directive applied to
“all intelligence related matters,”
not just to classified questions
.
The strategic effect of that will be further isolation of an intelligence community that desperately needs a richer and better-informed dialogue with the nation.

The Obama administration’s rigid control over messaging doesn’t help, either. General Mike Flynn’s early departure from the Defense Intelligence Agency in 2014 was a complex event, but there is no doubt that Mike’s testimony to Congress was more alarmist (and more accurate) than the administration’s preferred story line. Matt Olsen, as head of the National Counterterrorism Center, had his bureaucratic ears pinned back after he identified the Benghazi attack as terrorism in open session.

At the height of the Snowden kerfuffle, with allegation piling on allegation, I got frequent unofficial requests from intelligence community members to defend them and what they were doing because they were not allowed to do so by the administration. At one point, as I sat on the set of CBS’s
Face the Nation
, Bob Schieffer took advantage of a pause in the show to thank me for being there and then to ask, “Why are
you
here? The only people out here defending the current administration’s surveillance policies seem to be people from the previous administration.”

In that seminal speech on terrorism at National Defense University in May 2013, President Obama promised to ratchet up transparency when it came to targeted killings and drones. That still hasn’t happened, even as the strikes have become more contentious. And the official veil of secrecy has made it more difficult for knowledgeable people to contribute to mature public debate on the subject.

In April 2015, after American counterterrorism operations resulted in the death of two hostages in South Asia, multiple commentators trotted
out condemnations of targeted killings and the drone program. I wrote an op-ed for the
Washington Times
supporting such operations, using only official government statements. Since all my writing has to be cleared for classification, I dutifully submitted the piece and was told that no articles about drones would be cleared
regardless of the content
. I actually think that’s a misuse of the review process, but beyond that, it’s just plain stupid. That it took two days to convince the government of that fact says a lot.

I think the US government’s program of targeted killing is lawful, certainly within our technological competence, and effective for our purposes. As director of NSA, when explaining the backdrop to Stellarwind (chapter 5), I would use three Venn ovals labeled “Technologically Feasible,” “Operationally Relevant,” and “Legal.” The area where the ovals overlapped was the operating space that NSA worked in, I said.

By the time I was director of CIA, I had added a fourth Venn oval—one labeled “Politically Sustainable.” Presidents (and their intelligence agencies) get to do some things one-off based on raw executive authority. But no president, even a popular one, gets to do anything forever without bringing in the other political branches and, directly or indirectly, the American people.

Beyond a narrow base of lawfulness and just raw effectiveness, actions need to have political and policy legs, and they have to be created by
informed
debate. So sustaining an RDI program (chapters 10 and 12) simply required me to be more public about it. It’s hard to build a political consensus if people think you aren’t leveling with them.

 • • • 

O
F COURSE,
all of this is premised on the belief that American espionage is worth doing and worth defending. In my class at George Mason, I usually begin each semester by asking the students if espionage and all of its secrecy is compatible with a democracy. They usually say that it is. I’m pretty sure they believe it, too, even allowing that the guy asking (and ultimately grading) them is the former head of CIA and NSA.

I conclude the discussion with a more challenging proposition. “Rather than just being compatible with a democracy, espionage is essential to it. Frightened people don’t make good democrats. No spies. Less security. Less freedom.”

I then tell the class about the Washington premiere of the first episode of AMC’s miniseries
TURN
, a dramatized version of the espionage exploits of George Washington’s Culper Ring on Long Island during the Revolution. Jeanine and I were invited, and we enjoyed the showing, which was at the National Archives, and I got to participate in a panel following it. On the panel I celebrated the fact that the Culper Ring was being memorialized in popular culture and being memorialized there, at the archives, within twenty-five yards of the Constitution and a copy of the Magna Carta.

I admitted that “the American public has an uneasy relationship with espionage agencies. It’s just back and forth.” Part of that (not surprisingly) is the public’s incomplete knowledge. “You know about Benedict Arnold. You know about Nathan Hale. . . . [But there is] an absolute, iron rule about espionage: You know about the spies who fail. You don’t know about the spies who succeed.”

And that’s why I welcomed the moment (and the TV series), since it gave me the opportunity to note that the nation’s first spymaster was its first president. He even insisted on and got a covert-action budget from Congress. The point was that this was thoroughly American: “Espionage is as old as the republic,” I said. “Baseball, apple pie . . . it goes back to our roots.”

But being necessary and traditional doesn’t make it easy. I end that first session with my GMU students with a reading of Plato’s parable of the cave and its probing questions about appearances and realities and the challenges of discovering truth.

“Can we ever really know the truth?” I ask and then continue by describing a conversation I had three decades earlier with a political officer in Communist Bulgaria. Frustrated by some of his remarks during a lengthy discussion (the subject of which I have long forgotten), I blurted
out to him in frustration, “What is truth to you?” and he just as quickly answered, “Truth? Truth is what serves the Party.”

Which sets the stage for talking about the true nature of intelligence, or at least the nature of intelligence in a modern democracy. I liken the intelligence-policy dialogue as a room with two doors, one labeled intelligence, the other reserved for the decision maker. Since the decision maker can range from a tactical commander, to a cabinet secretary, to a president, the “room” can range from a canvas-covered tactical operations center, to an ornate office, to an oval one.

In any case, the dynamics are the same. Even though the two enter through separate doors, the intelligence professional must connect with the decision maker. Ideally, that would be in the center of the room, but even if it is not, the job of intelligence is to impose itself on the thinking of the other, no matter how far one has to walk to capture him.

And that can be hard, since to legitimately enter through the intelligence door, one has to be fact-based and see the world as it is, while the policy maker is rightly vision-based (taking us somewhere) and picturing the world as he/she would like it to be.

The intelligence door demands thinking based on inductive reasoning. Swimming in a sea of particulars, the intelligence officer is working to create the general, be that a judgment, a conclusion, or even just the controlling narrative (
Sir, what we thought was an insurgency in Iraq is now clearly a civil war
). The policy maker trends powerfully deductive, trying to apply his or her first principles (the ones that swayed the electorate) to a specific circumstance (
Give me the prisoner-by-prisoner plan to close Guantánamo, as I promised to do
).

The intelligence professional trends pessimistic. Bob Gates once quipped that when a CIA analyst stops to smell the flowers, he always looks around for the hearse. If the policy maker isn’t an optimist, he or she wouldn’t pursue the job. (Remember, they said they would make things better.)

The trick is for the fact-based, inductive, world-as-it-is pessimist to get into the head of the vision-based, deductive, world-as-we-want-it-to-be
optimist without betraying his own roots (and his legitimacy for being there in the first place). And to do it knowing that with every sentence, he is making the policy maker’s day worse than it would otherwise have been (
Mr. President, looks like we may have a near-complete nuclear reactor in eastern Syria
or
Mr. President, given what we know, I would NOT characterize ISIS as the JV team
).

Intelligence does not set policy, but when done right, it sets the right- and left-hand boundaries for any rational policy discussion. That is its critical contribution.

On balance, American intelligence masters the art and science of this process pretty well. It is the only intelligence community today that is or is required to be global, and how well it performs that task is best reflected in the number of foreign intelligence services that routinely make the pilgrimage to Langley to enlist support and cement cooperation. There have been mistakes and failures, and I have participated in my share of them, but it is also a truism that there is only so much even good intelligence can do in the service of flawed policy.

But now there are bigger questions than just the competency of American spying. Despite the roots going back to Washington, espionage has never sat easy on the American psyche. At NSA I was fond of saying, “The agency requires only two things to be successful. We need to be powerful and we need to be secretive. And we live in a political culture that distrusts only two things.”

Power and secrecy, of course.

We are seeing that play out today in dramatic tones, many of them dark. There are many who, on learning what measures have been taken to deal with new flavors of threat (like terrorism) or new technologies (like a single global integrated cyber grid), have assumed the worst and have been unrelentingly critical of what they have dubbed the “surveillance state.”

Others have unfairly labeled any such concerns as perforce emanating from the permanently paranoid, black-helicopter-fearing, tinfoil-hat-wearing crowd.

I really do try to point out that this is NOT a struggle between the forces of light and the forces of darkness, as some seem to assume. This is the normal job of balancing that free people assume when they are serious about both their security and their liberty. We have a history of tacking back and forth on this issue as broader conditions (like the nature and level of threat) dictate.

I am fond of reminding audiences that soon after throwing out George III for his overbearing rule, we became disenchanted with the successor government under the Articles of Confederation, since it was too weak to protect the country or do much of anything that we expect governments to do. The miracle of Philadelphia fixed that with a much stronger centralized authority—strong enough to be feared, actually, so that almost immediately it was constrained by the quick passage of ten amendments to limit its power, the Bill of Rights. We’ve seen this movie before. In fact, we’ve been in it.

Fears of the “surveillance state” and “rogue agencies” are now emanating from the impassioned right as much as the impassioned left. In early 2015 I agreed to appear at CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Conference—the annual rally/convention/revival in Washington. I was to debate Judge Andrew Napolitano, Fox News’ resident libertarian jurist, on NSA’s 215 program. The judge and I know each other and actually are friends. I expected it to be fun, and it was.

After the judge opened with a predictably harsh diatribe dripping with emotive constitutional references, I stood up and began by saying, “Judge Napolitano is an unrelenting libertarian,” to the cheers of many of the thousands of twenty-something libertarians in the crowd.

As the cheering died down, I continued, “And so am I,” a remark that generated some catcalls, some booing, and at least one shouted, “No, you’re not!”

Undeterred, I then added that I was a libertarian who, for most of his adult life, was charged with fulfilling another part of that foundational document, the part that said, “Provide for the common defense.” And I reminded the young crowd that
their
favorite part didn’t protect them
from all searches, just
unreasonable
ones. And so it went for thirty more minutes.